Yeah, the world is a social place. There's a reason European royalty sent their kids to etiquette classes, and even these days fraternities and sororities have formals. That's how the world works. Someone that's surprised by this in their 20s or 30s was failed by their parents or immediate community and this has nothing to do with college.

You need to be nice to people, you need to be friendly, you need to know people, attend events, be fun and jovial, etc. Politeness and relationships are the underpinning of our entire society.

But if you're introverted (like me), this takes very deliberate practice. Over the past few years, I've posted in every monthly "who's hiring" thread here on HN as just an exercise and to meet people (mostly local to LA). I've met dozens of really cool entrepreneurs, fellow engineers, VPs, C-levels, and other smart folks. Most of these connections will go nowhere, but I wanted to practice being more outgoing by grabbing a beer or coffee and talking about life/technology/anything with strangers. I was able to put together an investor I met with a friend of mine that's trying to raise money; was able to pitch some startup ideas to folks that worked in that domain; but more importantly grow my rolodex and become more comfortable with the art of networking.

If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.

Public school is at at least 2 levels if not more. Elite will remain in their own world. Rich will just pour money on their kids education, middle class and the poor are fucked.

In France, most 18 years old would fail the brevet (end of middle school degree) as it was given in 1950s/60s. All the exams are pure jokes, and we see it in international education survey (PISA or even better TIMMS, level are dropping beside for the top 5%)

Even at the college level, education doesn’t seem to extend past “teaching to the test” horrifyingly often (horrifying, given the amount of time and money our society is spending on it).

Bad example. Lambda School had some pretty bad press on HN about having lower completion rates than advertised, etc.

I've tried to explain that for 99% of CS majors, your grades do not matter. If you're spending your time in college constantly studying and worrying about getting an A in your test because oh no your GPA will be a 3.8 otherwise, you haven't really assessed what's important. Go to college; do your best to learn because the material is useful and pretty neat; socialize, have fun; then find a job. That's it. A 4.0 isn't that important.

In my experience it’s the tools and tech around working as more than a singleton. That’s the job. To be blunt, most industry jobs do not require a deep computer science background, so the content of the degree is worth less than the experience it gets you access to.

The first assumption that needs to change in order to revert the status of the college degree is the well meaning but false idea that competence can be taught to anyone. It gives people a false sense of optimism which frequently results in angst, debt, and wasted years.

I was taught (for better or worse), by STEM grad parents no less, that the only college to strive for is an elite liberal arts education, and the purpose was to broaden my horizons and make connections. It explicitly wasn't to decide on a career and learn hard job skills.

I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more and more low-skill jobs

With regard to the context of the article, the example that Uber driver gets a degree in acturial science does not tell much. Probably he is just doing worse than other graduates - even though he is qualified for an acturial job, the employer has tons of better candidates.

You read a bunch of books. You go to lectures. You answer questions to see if you understood the material.

The content is entirely in the public domain. You can read the same content as I did and understand how to build a radio, a bridge, etc, just like me. There are literally no secrets below phd level, and nowadays you even have easy access to multiple explanations of the same ideas.

There isn't even that much teaching, and I say that having attended multiple 2-on-1 tutorials each week for close to 100 weeks. So about 3-400 hours total contact time. Add to that quite a few hours studying for those tutorials, maybe 4 hours for each hour of contact? Depends on how diligent you were.

Compare that to my work, where I've regularly worked 60-80 hour weeks for years and years, of which maybe 40 hours was sitting next to a professional superior. Basically in your first months you spend more time sitting next to an expert than your entire degree. My non-contact hours, where I'd read about finance, was similar: after not very long I'd done a similar amount of non-contact work such as reading a textbook.

My point is that there's no way that university can qualify you for work. Yes, there are jobs that you need specific degrees to get, but even in those jobs you are normally not considered anything but a junior, entry-level person when you finish the course. You're literally not a lawyer when you finish a law degree, and not an engineer when you get your Master of Engineering (like me).

So why do employers want to hire graduates, especially graduates of specific universities and courses?

The reason is they think there's a degree to which people who got into top universities in certain courses are capable of learning the necessary material for a new profession. The material may be completely different from what the person studied, in fact it most often is just so. As what I wrote above explains, it should not take long to cover an equivalent amount of material.

Computer Science may well be the only exception to this rule. On CS courses (I've looked over the shoulder of a couple of students, and I know a professor) people actually do things with a rather large overlap with professional coding. For instance, when I was in uni I built a toy radio and a toy bridge using toy tools. A CS student uses the same Git to version control his stuff, and the same compilers to build them. There's a number of CS labs that maintain actual production code that people use.

This probably means a CS student has a shorter spin-up period, but they still hit the professional time dynamics I mentioned: get a coding job and you'll learn a lot about coding that you didn't learn on the course, really fast.

There are also some economic issues about degrees.

There's a fairly strong adverse signalling effect: if you get a degree but you don't find a job reasonably fast, or you lost your job, why is that? Did other employers interview you and discover some sort of attitude problem? Perhaps I should just interview the regular new grads. You definitely don't know what a professional knows, and I can train up someone smart, and there's plenty of smart kids coming out of uni.

The same goes for your uber driver: if they gave up on getting an actuary job, which is one of the highest paying jobs in society and well worth trying to persevere at, why is that? If he's given up, why would I back him? It's an unfortunate dynamic, but it's definitely there.

Regarding "who you know, not what you know", there's a good explanation for that as well.

If you have a field of people who are "good enough", and you aren't short of them, and they're not easily differentiable, the employer might as well hire his nephew (this is where the term nepotism comes from). And because of the dynamic explained, there's an awfully large field of good enough people: they are mostly a blank slate anyway, having shown just a bit of promise. Of course you'll never know if your nephew was actually among the best, but it will certainly seem that way once he starts gaining experience.

This is why we get a lot of famous peoples' kids breaking into fields like acting, where there's a small number of jobs for a large field of people who could actually do the job. (Though I hesitate to use the same explanation in competitive sports like soccer, where there's a very strong differentiation. Eg Frank Lampard didn't need his uncle to put him on the team, he'd have gotten there anyway.)

How do you know if you are in the bottom 10%?

Also, baccalaureat now includes has a “Grand oral”, an standup exam where women succeed much better, where presentation matters way more than depth, and where positive discrimination can take place without leaving a trail.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_FRA.pdf [2] https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results19/index.asp#/math/trends

I saw signs of that academic dysfunction from other departments too. This was at a very non-prestigious state school, but that's the type of school that most students attend. There must be millions of people in the US walking around with degrees in subjects they don't know much about.

My alma mater didn't really push internships, but in retrospect perhaps a strong internship program would help students self select against employers.

Without additional context, my guess would be that the Uber driver maybe focused on applications of math and statistics to the insurance industry, but maybe focused more on passing actuarial exams and less on using programming in order to implement the models. Some of the actuarial exams cover finance, statistics, and math; it feels like the driver would be suited to do data science work. It would be interesting to hear more about where the driver is located and whether he/she was only targeting the insurance industry or if that person was looking at other jobs in analytics.

EDIT: I started my business on the premise that universities teach a lot of "fundamentals", but that I don't believe higher education does not do as much as they should to teach the practical "day to day" skills (like data visualization or software version control / git) that are needed to get development work done. My thought is that a couple of online courses can quickly help to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Dont forget that when colleges didnt exist for everyone, say 200 years ago, most people were farmers.

People are selective when it comes to timeframe, but it's just a mean regression - some periods reach peak, some get back lower, but all in all, we're trending up.